In the summer of 1991, at the Sea of Faith conference in Leicester, two intellectual bruisers debated religion and humanism. One was Nicolas Walter: anarchist, peace activist and passionate rationalist. The other was Don Cupitt: elegant, Cambridge, deanish and donnish. Their debate was not the familiar one which had raged for a century, between humanism and Christianity. What was at issue was not humanism but the kind of humanism which might speak to the condition of a postmodern world at the scruff-end of two Christian millennia.